一句话：对28个开源项目40,248次合并提交的挖掘表明，代码重构会显著增加合并工作量的发生概率与强度。
在协作软件开发中，多名贡献者常并行修改源码，合并时可能产生冲突并需要人工介入。本文关注改变源码结构的代码重构是否会影响合并工作量。作者从28个流行开源项目的40,248个合并提交中提取关联规则，分析重构出现、重构数量、并行重构与合并工作量之间的关系。结果表明：重构会提高出现合并工作量的概率；重构越多，发生概率与工作量强度越高；并行重构会进一步放大这种影响。该结果提示开发者团队可能需要调整重构实施方式，并为改进代码合并工具和重构推荐工具提供了依据。
In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged into the same version of the source code. However, the merge operation can fail, and developer intervention is required to resolve the conflicts. Studies in the literature show that 10 to 20 percent of all merge attempts result in conflicts, which require the manual developer's intervention to complete the process. In this paper, we concern about a specific type of change that affects the structure of the source code and has the potential to increase the merge effort: code refactorings. We analyze the relationship between the occurrence of refactorings and the merge effort. To do so, we applied a data mining technique called association rule extraction to find patterns of behavior that allow us to analyze the influence of refactorings on the merge effort. Our experiments extracted association rules from 40,248 merge commits that occurred in 28 popular open-source projects. The results indicate that: (i) the occurrence of refactorings increases the chances of having merge effort; (ii) the more refactorings, the greater the chances of effort; (iii) the more refactorings, the greater the effort; and (iv) parallel refactorings increase even more the chances of having effort, as well as the intensity of it. The results obtained may suggest behavioral changes in the way refactorings are implemented by developer teams. In addition, they can indicate possible ways to improve tools that support code merging and those that recommend refactorings, considering the number of refactorings and merge effort attributes.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{abs-2305-06129,
title = {Do code refactorings influence the merge effort?},
author = {André Oliveira and Vânia Neves and Alexandre Plastino and Ana Carla Bibiano and Alessandro Garcia and Leonardo Murta},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/icse48619.2023.00023}
}